Absolute
Entitlement: A quota or more of first
preference votes under quota-preferential
PR provides a
properly-qualified candidate receiving them
with a simple absolute entitlement to be
elected. If some candidates receive well
over a quota of first preference votes,
there will not be enough first preference
votes left for all the other successful
candidates to obtain a quota of first
preference votes, so their legitimate quotas
will have to include first preference votes
for other candidates that have had to be
transferred to them in accordance with the
voters’ order of preference, either as
surplus votes or as votes of an excluded
candidate.

*

Legitimate
Election without Any First Preferences:
It is possible and legitimate for a
candidate gaining no first preference votes
at all to receive a quota of votes, and be
elected, by surplus transfers from one or
more candidates that have, among them,
gained two or more quotas of first
preference votes. Such election is fair and
reasonable if voters have explicitly voted
that way, but it is not so fair and
reasonable if it has arisen from the use of
Group Voting Tickets, which can mislead
voters that are busy, distracted or less
that fully aware of their being manipulated
by such Tickets.

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Group
Voting Tickets: If a party’s voters have
decided, or have been persuaded or
conditioned - as has happened with Group
Voting Tickets since they
began in Australia in 1983 - to vote for the
first-listed in a single order of party
candidates put forward at an election, it is
usual for that first-listed candidate to
receive nearly all the first preference
votes for that party, leaving every other
candidate of that party with only a tiny
number of first preference votes. That regimentation
of the vote existed before Group Voting
Tickets, but they have facilitated the
regimentation much further. The use of Group
Voting Tickets for Senate elections was
discontinued in March 2016.

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Example
of GVT Use: Controversy over the 2004
election of Senator Stephen Fielding, of the
Family First Party, in Victoria
with very few first preference votes has led
to ill-informed critics casting doubt on the
system that allowed him to be elected a
senator for that reason, but such critics
are silent about the even smaller number of
first preference votes that nearly all
larger party senators received. Like Senator
Fielding, those senators assembled most of
their quotas with preference votes
transferred as surpluses from elected
candidates, or as full value transfers from
excluded candidates, but those transfers
were mandated not mainly by the voters
explicitly, as with Tasmania’s Hare-Clark system
and its Robson
Rotation, but by very
dubiously-contrived Group Voting Tickets
that were not widely examined by voters.

Casual
Vacancies: When PR casual vacancies are
properly filled using countback,
the first preference votes cast for the
successful replacement candidate are not
relevant to that candidate’s election, as
the replacement candidate is decided by the
Returning Officer re-examining the
ballot-papers that made up the quota of
votes cast by the voters for the vacating
candidate in order to determine which
candidate unelected at the original poll has
received, after any distribution of
preferences that might be needed, an
absolute majority of the next available
preferences, none of which will obviously be
first preferences. An example
of a municipal countback
election explains that.